


Like Playing Music, But You Never Sing

by SegaBarrett



Category: Bates Motel (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7216291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrey is a woman who doesn't stay in one place very long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Playing Music, But You Never Sing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Emerla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emerla/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Bates Motel, and I make no money from this. 
> 
> Warning: Implied mutual intoxicated sex and alluded to canonical violence.
> 
> A/N: Title from "Jackie Blue" by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

Audrey Decody sits up in bed and stretches, ready to face the day. She runs her hands down her shirt and yawns. Something happened last night, and it’s slowly coming back to her. She doesn’t feel regret, exactly, just a tired annoyance.

Another humdrum, boring day in which she must do what she must do.

She scratches the back of her neck and looks at the man sleeping beside her. 

He must have drunk a lot more than she had. He’s pretty dead to the world.

And that is quite good.

She hops off the best, ever-so-quietly, and approaches the man. He had left on his jacket – a tan leather deal – and his wallet is hanging temptingly out of his pocket.

She makes short work of getting it out.

No credit card and no ID – probably so much the better. But there’s a stack of twenties inside and that’s good enough for her. She fishes the majority of them out and sticks them in her pocket, then grabs her own purse and quickly heads for the door.

She hears it click behind her but by that time, she’s already home free. It’s a beautiful feeling to know the wind is at her back and that no one can catch her.

When she’s far enough away to breathe easy, she ducks under the canopy of a bodega (Martinez Mart, which has a nice ring to it actually) and lights a cigarette. She likes watching the smoke dance against the night sky.

It’s a nice little place to be. She can’t stay here forever, though, not with the eviction notices no doubt piling up on her door in Sacramento. But she should have a week or two left, and hopefully if she bursts in to the leasing office and says the right words, she’ll have enough of an extension to get some of the rent together.

She takes another drag and runs her tongue over her teeth.

Always running.

***  
When she gets back to Sacramento and uses some of the stack of bills to get her phone turned back on, there’s fifteen messages in her inbox – most of them are promotions from Bath and Body Works as well as the local Target, there’s also an e-mail bearing the sender name of William Decody.

The subject line reads, “Emma,” and Audrey wants to drop the phone upon noticing it. 

What’s going on with her daughter? Would Will really be so callous as to e-mail her to tell her that Emma had died? Now, there was a call she had been waiting for, for years now. Waiting and dreading and, a little bit, hoping for, because then that shoe would have dropped and she could have dealt with however she would feel about that, think over all the regret for a couple of days, get dead drunk and then move on.

She will never forgive him if he is telling her this news in an e-mail. She will find a way to snap his neck if that’s what this is. But what else could it be? 

She opens the e-mail and reads it, not totally believing it on the first read. She reads it again, and then one more time.

Emma is getting a lung transplant. If everything goes well, she’s going to live.

Her little girl could live to be twenty or forty or… 

She’s going to have an actual life. The things Audrey’s been dreading for years… they won’t happen.

Well, maybe not. This whole thing could be a bust, she points out to herself. People die on the table every day – she’s seen it on Grey’s Anatomy.

This could be her last shot to make things right with Emma. She has to say something, do something. But what?

***

She sits at the airport bar, tossing back another margarita. Is she really going to go through with it? She has the stuffed rabbit – the only thing she still had of Emma besides a snapshot she’d sent her a few months earlier in a letter, one she never looked at because she couldn’t stand to see those damn tubes sticking out of her nose – in her luggage and the letter’s written and stuck in her purse, but she could still go back, couldn’t she? Abandon the flight and head home for whatever her nightly plans could be.

Her foot itches, and suddenly everything in the world is a huge pain in the ass. Staying here is a pain, but so is going… well, it isn’t home exactly, it has never been her home and that strikes her, suddenly, as incredibly unfair and the saddest thing she has ever known.

Shouldn’t a mother have a home with her own daughter? Who had Will been to take that from her, with his judgment and his yelling and the way he’d flick things across the room when she said something he didn’t like and look at her like he really wanted to hit her this time but wouldn’t allow her even that.

In her mind, Emma is still so tiny – the little girl who had loved when her parents read her fairy tales.

Audrey wonders when all of those evil stepmothers realized that they had been written in as villains in their own stories. She wonders what they ever thought to do about it.

She pulls out her wallet, pays her bill, and checks for her ticket. The whole thing is useless.

Her ex-husband will be the hero of this story all over again.

***

She rolls into the hospital and wants to scream when she sees some punk-ass kid sitting in the waiting room asking her who she is. Like she’s the loch ness monster or Bigfoot or some goddamned mirage. Like she’s some big secret.

She’s Emma’s mother, goddamnit, and what she hates most about this kid is that he looks quite a bit like every man Audrey has ever slept with.

Will must be mad that his little girl turned out just like her mother in some ways.

She wonders if she should plead her case to the Rebel Without A Cause, but then throws away that idea in favor of another one.

In the letter – the one Audrey has tucked in the pocket of her suitcase – Emma had written to her, telling her she worked at a little motel. How much she loved Norma, who ran the place, and Norman, her son.

Audrey feels a flush of jealousy even thinking about it. That woman probably knows more about Emma than Audrey ever will.

And so she goes to the motel.

***

Audrey Decody wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about a “near-death experience”. She’s been strangled nearly to death and then placed in a freezer, and only narrowly got out with her life.

Who, exactly, does one go to tell about something like this? 

It’s not as if she’s going to go report it to the police – she has never been on the best of terms with law enforcement and is sure she still has a warrant or two pending. Will won’t listen to her and Norma Bates certainly won’t – her son is completely crazy, after all, she had to have some role in that.

She doesn’t even know where she can get another motel.

At least she has her cell phone. Thank God for Uber.

***

She finds a random chair in the maternity lounge and tries to ignore the fact that women are screaming their heads off in the next wall. Get used to it, ladies, it’s not even going to pay off. Your kids are going to forget you anyway.

Finally, she sneaks back to where Emma’s room is and waits for Will and the Rebel to walk out, presumably to the cafeteria or something.

She strolls into Emma’s room and stares for a long while. There she is, sleeping soundly – thankfully any tubes seem to have been removed and she just looks as if she’s sleeping.

Audrey gets tired of waiting after about fifteen minutes, and reaches over to gently shake her daughter awake.

Her eyes slowly flutter open, and they register a look of confusion and then a slight panic when they see the same eyes looking back at her.

“…Mom?” she rasps. 

“Hi, Emma,” Audrey chirps. She hates how high-pitched her voice sounds.

Emma shuffles into a sitting position and stares at her.

“When did you get here? What happened?”

“Your dad let me know you were getting the surgery so…” Audrey begins, then takes a deep sigh. There’s so much she wants to ask her and tell her too. “So I flew out to see you. How do you feel?” She hopes it’s nothing bad, can’t stand bad news, doesn’t need it right now, only good news. Can still feel the soreness around her neck. Should maybe have it looked at but they’d probably put her on some kind of list, give her a pamphlet. If they only knew.

“Good. It’s kind of weird,” Emma tells her. “Thanks… Thanks for coming.”

They look at each other for a long moment, and everything Audrey was going to ask her has flown out the window. It’s funny to think and wonder about someone for so long but to find yourself speechless when actually faced with them. It isn’t as if she can laugh and bring up some shared experience, some inside joke they can start chuckling about like old college friends who have just reunited. 

Audrey’s most recent memories of Emma are of her wetting the bed, being terrified of the dehumidifier, and not wanting to go to school because the substitute teacher was mean – none are particularly good starters for a conversation.

But neither is telling her that she’d gotten strangled by the boy Emma had a crush on.

“So. Who’s the kid with the beard?” she asks instead.

“Oh… That’s Dylan. He’s… my boyfriend. Sort of. It’s kind of recent.”

“Oh. So you’re over Norman then?”

Emma pauses.

“Oh, well… It didn’t work out. Dylan’s his brother, actually. It’s kind of awkward.”

“Oh. I dated brothers once – I know how it is.” Audrey wonders at that – the two don’t particularly look alike, but that may be a good thing, considering her experience with Norman. She pauses and moves to stand. “Anyway, your dad and your… Dylan… are probably coming back soon. They won’t want me here. I brought some things for you but I… left them at the motel. A letter, and your rabbit, too.”

“My rabbit?”

“Yeah, the one you used to always carry around when you were a little girl.”

Emma shrugs.

“I guess I wondered what happened to that…”

“Well, it’s at the motel. You can pick it up whenever you get out of here.” 

She moves to the door.

“You’re leaving?” Emma asks. Audrey does a little shrug. She wonders what Emma would do if she told her about what happened, if she told her that her friend had tried to strangle her, that she had nearly lost her forever. Maybe Emma would cling to her then, beg her not to go. Maybe they could go around and jet-set together, a perfect mother and perfect, healthy daughter. Like a cosmetics ad.

“Yeah. You know me. I never stick around for long.” She walks back over and kisses Emma on the forehead.

“Mom! What the hell happened to your neck?”

Audrey laughs.

“Rough sex. You’ll learn about it one day, now that you’ve got that nice new pair of lungs. Try ‘em out, Emma.” She ruffles her hair and walks out through the door before she can think better of it.

***

Audrey Decody orders another vodka and tonic, then looks up at a bottle on the wall. 

“What’s cookies and cream vodka?” she asks.

“Trust me,” says a voice behind her, “You don’t want to try it.”

She turns her head to find herself looking at a man in a tan jacket.

“Hey,” he says, “I think I know you.”

Audrey smiles.


End file.
